The world is abuzz with talk of automation. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics seem set to transform the world of work. In the most advanced factories, companies like Tesla have been aiming for ‘lights-out’ production, in which fully automated work processes, no longer needing human hands, can run in the dark. Meanwhile, in the illuminated halls of robotics conventions, machines are on display that can play ping-pong, cook food, have sex and even hold conversations. Computers are not only developing new strategies for playing Go, but are said to be writing symphonies that bring audiences to tears. Dressed in white lab coats or donning virtual suits, computers are learning to identify cancers and will soon be developing legal strategies. Trucks are already barrelling across the us without drivers; robotic dogs are carrying military-grade weapons across desolate plains. Are we living in the last days of human toil? Is what Edward Bellamy once called the ‘edict of Eden’ about to be revoked, as ‘men’—or at least, the wealthiest among them—become like gods?footnote¹

There are many reasons to doubt the hype. For one thing, machines remain comically incapable of opening doors or, alas, folding laundry. Robotic security guards are toppling into mall fountains. Computerized digital assistants can answer questions and translate documents, but not well enough to do the job without human intervention; the same is true of self-driving cars.footnote² In the midst of the American ‘Fight for Fifteen’ movement, billboards went up in San Francisco threatening to replace fast-food workers with touchscreens if a law raising the minimum wage were passed. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the bill the ‘robot employment act’. Yet many fast-food workers in Europe already work alongside touchscreens and often earn better pay than in the us.footnote³ Is the talk of automation overdone?

In the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, scare stories about automation may remain just idle chatter. However, over the past decade, this talk has crystalized into an influential social theory, which purports not only to analyse current technologies and predict their future, but also to explore the consequences of technological change for society at large. This automation discourse rests on four main propositions. First, workers are already being displaced by ever-more advanced machines, resulting in rising levels of ‘technological unemployment’. Second, this displacement is a sign that we are on the verge of achieving a largely automated society, in which nearly all work will be performed by self-moving machines and intelligent computers. Third: automation should entail humanity’s collective liberation from toil, but because we live in a society where most people must work in order to live, this dream may well turn out to be a nightmare.footnote⁴ Fourth, therefore, the only way to prevent a mass-unemployment catastrophe is to provide a universal basic income (ubi), breaking the connection between the incomes people earn and the work they do, as a way to inaugurate a new society.

This argument has been put forward by a number of self-described futurists. In the widely read Second Machine Age (2014), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that we find ourselves ‘at an inflection point—a bend in the curve where many technologies that used to be found only in science fiction are becoming everyday reality.’ New technologies promise an enormous ‘bounty’, but Brynjolfsson and McAfee caution that ‘there is no economic law that says that all workers, or even a majority of workers, will benefit from these advances.’ On the contrary: as the demand for labour falls with the adoption of more advanced technologies, wages are stagnating; a rising share of annual income is therefore being captured by capital rather than by labour. The result is growing inequality, which could ‘slow our journey’ into what they call ‘the second machine age’ by generating a ‘failure mode of capitalism’ in which rentier extraction crowds out technological innovation.footnote⁵ In Rise of the Robots (2015), Martin Ford similarly claims that we are pushing ‘towards a tipping point’ that is poised to ‘make the entire economy less labour-intensive.’ Again, ‘the most frightening long-term scenario of all might be if the global economic system eventually manages to adapt to the new reality’, leading to the creation of an ‘automated feudalism’ in which the ‘peasants would be largely superfluous’ and the elite impervious to economic demands.footnote⁶ For these authors, education and retraining will not be enough to stabilize the demand for labour in an automated economy; some form of guaranteed non-wage income, such as a negative income tax, must be put in place.footnote⁷

The automation discourse has been enthusiastically adopted by the jeans-wearing elite of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates is advocating for a tax on robots. Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard undergraduate inductees that they should ‘explore ideas like universal basic income’, a policy Elon Musk also thinks will become increasingly ‘necessary’ over time, as robots outcompete humans across a growing range of jobs.footnote⁸ Musk has been naming his SpaceX drone vessels after spaceships from Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series, a set of ambiguously utopian science-fiction novels depicting a post-scarcity world in which human beings live fulfilling lives alongside intelligent robots, called ‘minds’, without the need for markets or states.footnote⁹

Politicians and their advisors have equally identified with the automation discourse, which has become one of the leading perspectives on our ‘digital future’. In his farewell presidential address, Obama suggested that the ‘next wave of economic dislocations’ will come not from overseas trade, but rather from ‘the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.’ Robert Reich, former Labour Secretary under Bill Clinton, expressed similar fears: we will soon reach a point ‘where technology is displacing so many jobs, not just menial jobs but also professional jobs, that we’re going to have to take seriously the notion of a universal basic income.’ Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, made the same admission: once-‘stupid’ ideas about technological unemployment now seem increasingly smart, he said, as workers’ wages stagnate and economic inequality rises. The discourse has become the basis of a long-shot presidential campaign for 2020: Andrew Yang, Obama’s former ‘Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship’, has penned his own tome on automation, The War on Normal People, and is now running a futuristic campaign on a ‘Humanity First’, ubi platform. Among Yang’s vocal supporters is Andy Stern, former head of the seiu, whose Raising the Floor is yet another example of the discourse.footnote¹⁰

Yang and Stern—like all of the other writers named so far—take pains to assure readers that some variant of capitalism is here to stay, even if it must jettison its labour markets; however, they admit to the influence of figures on the far left who offer a more radical version of the automation discourse. In Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that the ‘most recent wave of automation is poised’ to transform the labour market ‘drastically, as it comes to encompass every aspect of the economy’.footnote¹¹ They claim that only a socialist government would actually be able to fulfil the promise of full automation by creating a post-work or post-scarcity society. In Four Futures, Peter Frase thoughtfully explores the alternative outcomes for such a post-scarcity society, depending on whether it still had private property and still suffered from resource scarcity, which could persist even if labour scarcity were overcome.footnote¹² Like the liberal proponents of the automation discourse, these left-wing writers stress that, even if the coming of advanced robotics is inevitable, ‘there is no necessary progression into a post-work world’.footnote¹³ Srnicek, Williams and Frase are all proponents of ubi, but in a left-wing variant. For them, ubi serves as a bridge to ‘fully automated luxury communism’, a term originally coined in 2014 by Aaron Bastani to name a possible goal of socialist politics, and which flourished for five years as a meme on the internet before his book—outlining an automated future in which artificial intelligence, solar power, gene-editing, asteroid mining and lab-grown meat generate a world of limitless leisure and self-invention—finally appeared.footnote¹⁴